Blackmagic transforms 60 iPhones into a high-speed camera for Vogue

The union of 60 Apple iPhone 17 Pro phones with the application Blackmagic Camera and a Camera ProDock unit has allowed production company Media Storm to recreate the effect bullet time which would usually be recreated a high-speed camera and a robotic system.

A few months ago, several posts on social networks from the Chinese edition of Vogue, in which different celebrities from the Asian country were shown with a “bullet time” effect, had a great impact. The effect was not created through specialized cinematographic systems, but with a workflow developed by Media Storm in which they were deployed 60 iPhone 17 Pro phones and solutions Blackmagic Design.

For this project, coordination was key. Media Storm needed the 60 phones function in a synchronized manner, which was achieved by deploying the system Blackmagic Camera ProDock. In the words of Team Pan, founder of the production company: "We developed our own way of mounting the cameras and kept the same distance between each phone. We combined the Blackmagic Camera ProDock units with phone clamps, then mounted the entire system on stabilizers, and later attached the latter to the rest of the equipment."

As Pan details, a “single traditional film camera” would cost more than “all the equipment we use here.” “Also, with smartphones, assembly is easier, so we were able to adjust the position of the cameras in situ and bring them closer, making movements look more fluid,” he added.

The Blackmagic Camera application, key for deployment

All iPhone phones used the app Blackmagic Camera to record the material. To do this, the “batch parameter control via LAN” function offered by the application was deployed, which allowed the production company to unify the resolution, frame rate, exposure and other settings. The team also used custom tools to control the phones, giving the team the ability to start recording on all units at once, over a local network, and automatically send recorded footage to a server using the app Shortcuts. In addition, a recorder was used HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro in order to generate synchronization signals for all phones.

"We produced and finished nearly 40 clips on this occasion and, on average, each video took us practically only five minutes from filming to finishing. A team of four people was able to complete the entire project in just 24 hours. If we had adopted a conventional approach, it would have taken us more than twice as long. All stages of post-production were carried out in DaVinci Resolve Studio, including the final versions," explains the head of Media Storm, satisfied with a deployment that requires the configuration of a greater number of devices, but which has advantages in cost terms y ease of deployment.